Pitching with purpose: why your career story is the one thing you actually control

"Tell me about yourself." It’s the question that opens nearly every interview, and the one most people answer worst. They reach for their CV. Job, dates, job, dates, a line about being “results driven”, “collaborative” or a “strategic thinker”. The interviewer already has that CV in front of them. Reciting it back tells them nothing they didn’t already know. That’s the real problem with most career pitches. People treat them as a performance: a script to get through, a box to tick before the real conversation starts. A pitch isn’t a performance. It’s a decision, made before you open your mouth, about what you actually want someone to understand about you.

I call this pitching with purpose. The idea is simple: a pitch should open up a conversation, not close one down. You’re telling someone what’s genuinely unique about you and what you bring, so they can work out where you fit and whether they want you in the room. None of that works if you haven’t worked out the answer yourself first.

Start with what’s driving you, not what you think you should say

Before you can tell your story, you need to know what it’s actually about. That means an honest look inward. Have your career criteria shifted? What gives you energy, and where has it drained away? These aren’t warm-up questions. They’re the ones that decide whether your pitch sounds like you, or like a LinkedIn template. Then comes the harder question: what are your values? One way in is to think about the people you admire, and which of their characteristics you notice most. The traits you value in others are usually the ones you need to be honouring in yourself.

Then check how you’re actually landing

Values are the inside view. Reputation is the outside one, and they don’t always match. What’s your fit? What do you actually spend your time doing well? What do people say about you when you’re not in the room? That last question is the uncomfortable one, and it’s usually the most useful. Even a small realisation here can shift how you tell the entire story. Get this right and your story doesn’t sit apart from your career, bolted on for interview season. It runs underneath everything: your skills, your values, how you talk about your past, present and future, and who you need on side to help you get there. Nobody moves a career forward alone. You need people, which means you need to talk to them, which means you need a story worth telling. That doesn’t change as you get more senior, whatever the title on your LinkedIn suggests. The context shifts, but the building blocks don’t.

Say the one thing that matters, not everything

Back to ‘tell me about yourself’. Don’t reel off your CV. They can already see it, along with your LinkedIn, so reciting it chronologically tells them nothing new. The better question is: what’s not on there? Most people think their job in answer to this question is to cover everything. It isn’t. There are usually only one or two things the person in front of you actually needs to know to make their decision, and the first thing out of your mouth should be the one that hooks them in.

If you’re changing direction, don’t bet on a single path

Transitions are where people tie themselves in knots. Suddenly you're juggling two stories: one explaining where you've come from, one selling where you're headed, and you're not sure either one sounds authentic. That's not really a storytelling problem. It's a values question. What matters most right now? Balance, flexibility, autonomy, the chance to lead others? What's sitting behind the itch to move, and what are the skills you want to keep growing because they genuinely give you energy?

If you already have a specific move in mind, I'd still push you to map two or three others alongside it. Chasing one path in isolation doesn't give you enough to judge it against. So: what does the logical path look like? The wildcard? The moonshot, the one you feel like you can only chase if money and your current criteria weren't in the picture?

Once you've got all three down, go back to your skills and your values and stress-test each one. Will your skills actually get used here? Will this path sit in conflict with what you say matters to you? How does it sound when you say it out loud?

AI raises the bar. It doesn’t replace you

AI has changed the baseline, but I don’t think it’s going to take everyone’s job. The real threat is someone else in your field using it more effectively than you are. That’s a different problem, and it’s one you can actually do something about.

Don't hand it your story either. AI only knows what you've told it, so what comes back is a version of you with the richness sanded off: competent, plausible, and forgettable. The whole point of pitching with purpose is the warmth (and the mess) of the real thing – your real career story – based not just on your CV, but also all the bits a machine was never told about because you never thought to mention them. Outsource that and it stops being yours.

Used well, AI is a genuinely useful career development tool. The skill is learning to prompt it properly, so it doesn’t just hand you back everything you wanted to hear rather than what actually moves your thinking forward. You can’t opt out of AI. You can decide what you’re willing to trust it with, and what you’re not. That’s a boundary worth setting deliberately, not by accident.

Build the habit, not the one-off gesture

Career-building was never a single event. It’s a lifelong process, which is exactly why futureproofing your story matters more than getting it right once. You need to check back in with yourself regularly and ask whether it still holds.

You manage your money. You probably manage your health, or at least mean to. Your career deserves the same discipline: a proper, honest check-in, not just when you’re job hunting.

Because here’s what’s actually true in a market this unpredictable. You can’t control whether an applicant tracking system lets your CV through, or whether a human ever reads it. You can’t control the algorithm, or the market, or who else is in the room. But your story – and how deliberately you tell it – is yours, every time.